The Dark Side of Purim

ED Noor: Purim, 2016, runs from March 23 until March 24.

How many other cultures can you really find evidence of people celebrating genocide and terrorism, besides the Jews? The answer is none, but this is a real life example of Jewish mass murder on Purim, and Jew celebrating said murders. One couldn’t ask for a better illustration, but the world could certainly ask to do without Jews, so that we wouldn’t have to experience these murders to begin with.

There is no “dark side” to Purim.

The entire festival is dark … from EVERY ANGLE!

ED Noor: Purim debauchery in modern Israel. Are there any questions about Jewish morality here? It goes far beyond drunken Hasidim.

Jews DO know what Purim is all about. Here is a short essay by one who apparently wants to “calm the waters” and end the hatred of Amalek. Apparently. Sadly, the rabbinical story he tells was a one-time event and took place over a hundred years ago. It is apparent that not too many Jews have followed his example since that time. In fact, they have institutionalized genocide within their nation as we have all seen over the years.

The author seems to be motivated more by the shame heaped on Israel for their commemoration of Baruch Goldstein and his 1994 Hebron slaughter of praying Palestinians. So there is that public relations aspect of distancing himself (and all those self-designated enlightened and disenchanted “liberal” Jews) from that disgraceful crime. His bemoaned “loss of innocence” is, alas, in this case no more important than a child discovering the Tooth Fairy is a bogus concept, but an interesting comment nonetheless. It is one small step further introspection than most but certainly he has far to go. Take the piece with whatever value you wish to give it. Not too much, just another read of semi interest.

Do you think he still eats those Hamantaschen ears when the plate is passed?

Ed Noor: Young ShinBet infiltrator in training?

By Shaul Magid

These days, many liberal Jews think of Purim as a play date for the kids and a night of drunken debauchery for the grown-ups. We think of costumes and songs and noisemakers, a kind of carnival spirit. But the levity with which we approach Purim is actually pretty astonishing. Because this holiday, fun as it may seem on the surface, has a dark and dangerous underside to it.

Orthodox Israeli scientist and philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903-1994) was once asked whether he would consider living outside Israel. Leibowitz allegedly responded that, no, he would not, one reason being that Israel was the only place he could live where he never had to celebrate Purim. On Purim he would be in Jerusalem (as a walled city, Jerusalem celebrates Purim a day after everyone else, called Shushan Purim) and on the evening after Purim Leibowitz would travel to Tel Aviv. Thus he never had to read the Megillah nor drink to celebrate an act of bloody revenge ~ that time we killed Haman, his sons and 75,000 of the Jews’ enemies throughout the ancient Persian Empire. In typical fashion, Leibowitz cut to the chase. Purim is essentially about the celebration of violence.

Let us not forget that on Purim we drink to celebrate blotting out the nation of Amalek, of whom Haman is said to be a descendant. The Shabbat before Purim, called Shabbat Zakhor, Jews gather in synagogues to read the only biblically mandated Torah reading of the year, the verses that command genocide against the Amalekites. Perhaps we are commanded to get so inebriated on Purim to simulate the seemingly paradoxical notion of blotting out the memory of Haman through the very act of remembering Amalek. We must remember not only to not forget, but to blot out the enemy ~ not mercifully, but through genocide.

It is true that the rabbis long ago were aware of the danger of this commandment and put it to rest by saying we no longer know who Amalek is. But as Elliot Horowitz shows in painful detail in his must-read book Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence, Jews never really gave up on Amalek. In his introduction he cites an interview Jeffrey Goldberg did with now-Knesset member Moshe Feiglin in Haaretz in 1994. Feiglin told Goldberg “that although he could not link the Arabs with Amalek ‘genetically,’ their behavior was ‘typical of Amalek.’” What did Feiglin imply here? A young settler, Ayelet, was asked if she thought Amalek was alive today, and she said to Goldberg, “Of course,” and pointed toward an Arab village in the distance.

This Purim is the 20th anniversary of the 1994 Hebron massacre. Since then, every year at this time many Jews feel a twinge of embarrassment as they remember Baruch Goldstein, the American-Israeli who murdered 29 Palestinian Muslims at the Cave of the Patriarchs on Purim 20 years ago. But a mere twinge of embarrassment is too easy. Moshe Feiglin is an elected member of the Israeli government. And Ayelet is not an atypical settler supported by the government. And Goldstein’s grave in Kiryat Arba is a shrine for a whole community of Israelis. Amalek is arguably alive today in the minds of many Jews in ways it has not been in a long time (I recently saw a picture of Ahmadinejad with Hamantaschen ears on the Internet). An enemy is one thing. Amalek is something quite different.

ED Noor: Young Ahmad Dawabsheh, Amalek. “The mitzvah, then of wiping out Amalek [Palestinians], actually stems from the value of compassion and kindness ~ compassion on all those whom Amalek threatens to exterminate. This mitzvah is an ongoing one, and valid even today. Today, too, there are those ~ driven by a deep-seeded anti-Semitism ~ who desperately wish to kill us. These are the people whom the Torah commanded us to obliterate, to leave no memory of them.” ~ Rabbi Zalman Baruch Melamed

I have taken Purim very seriously my entire adult life. And I have paid for it the next day in spades. But Baruch Goldstein ruined that for me. It was a loss of innocence. Like many others, I could never celebrate Purim the same way after 1994. Because the problem with the Jews today is not only the liberals who don’t take Purim seriously; it is also the Jews who take Purim seriously. Very seriously. Too seriously.

So what should be done about this holiday? If you want to approach Purim with a spirit of open-mindedness this year, I’ve got an idea of how to do it. There is a story about blotting out Amalek told in the name of the Hasidic master Zvi Elimelekh of Dinov (1783-1841). I heard the story from Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach. During the Purim feast, Zvi Elimelekh suddenly stopped the festivities and said, “Saddle the horses and get the carriages, it is time to blot out Amalek.” His Hasidim were petrified. “What could the master mean?” Being obedient disciples, they got in their carriages and followed their rebbe. He rode into town to a local inn where the Polish peasants (the Amalekites of his day?) were engaged in their own drunken bash.

The rebbe and his disciples entered the inn. When the peasants saw them, they stopped dancing. The music stopped. Everyone circled around the rebbe and the Jews as they walked to the center of the dance floor. The room was silent. The rebbe looked at one of the peasants and put out his hand with his palm to the ceiling. Silence. The peasants looked at one another. Suddenly one of them stepped forward and took the rebbe’s hand. They slowly started dancing. The musicians began playing. In a matter of minutes, all the Hasidim and peasants were dancing furiously with one another.

Above, Purim celebrations, 2013. Happy Jews accost a Palestinian woman to enhance their spiritual growth. This day has, for centuries, been one of violence by many Jews against any available “Amalek”.

You want to blot out Amalek? Go to the mosque at the Tomb of the Patriarchs. Or any mosque. Reach out your hand. And dance. That is how you blot out Amalek. Crazy? Ask Zvi Elimelekh of Dinov. That is what it means to take Purim seriously after 1994.

Share this:

Like this:

LikeLoading...

Related

This entry was posted on 03/22/2016, 9:34 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0.
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

M, Point taken regarding the dead Germans, but no one even admits they were killed so your point is rather moot, alas. It is a “non note” in our history as has been passed down by the lying historians of the time and those who continue with the filthy lies.

As for the rest of your tirade, happy holiday. No one buys it. Children still dress up, adults degenerate… feminism… ah yes… pft. As nasty a concept today…. based on a woman who is famous for her honey pot? It is a celebration that the West wants nothing to do with. Drinking to the point of blindness to lose your ability to discern good from evil? yep. Certainly no intelligent Christian wants anything to do with that.

WE DO NOT BELIEVE IN THE SAME GOD YOU AND I. You all cannot even spell his name….

Your Jew-hatred and hysteria doesn’t bother us, not like it used to when we were vulnerable to your disorder, really, but I’m almost sure it’s killing you, an inherited mental disorder, any one so obsessed is guaranteed to be growing tumors of hatred, like it did Haman and his sons. Don’t want problems with Jews? Don’t f*ck with us. Easy. Happy Purim y’all. 4,000 and stronger every day.
_______________A: Not a bad comment overall. Just a few corrections are needed:
1. “Jew-hatred” is a pleonasm. You don’t need both words.
2. Israel itself is a “tumor of hatred.”
3. Citing Haman as if the Jewish tale of Purim were history makes you appear deranged. It is a fable through which Jews teach every generation of children unfortunate enough to have been born to a Jewish mother how to undermine the country that shelters them and kill as many Goyim as possible. It is also, according to Atzmon, the perfect metaphor for the Jewish lobby.
4. Not “doesn’t bother us” but “don’t bother us” unless you consider “hysteria” synonymous with Jews, like “hatred.”
5. Have you given serious consideration to Birobidjan. You won’t feel vulnerable there.

“Mental disease. Among the Jews the proportion of insane has been observed to be very large. From statistics collected by Buschan he concludes that they are four to six times more liable to mental disease than are non-Jews.”

or

” the proportion of Jewish, insane is in nearly all places very large, in some cases more than double that of the non-Jewish population.”

or

“The Jews, it is well known, are very neurotic, as is manifested by the frequency of various nervous affections among them (see Nervous Diseases)”

Just sayin’. No offense intended… just the facts, Sir, just the facts.

And in Robert’s comments, you can see the essence of the ‘Jewish problem’ as it has existed for thousands of years. In their paradigm, all reactionary behavior against them is rooted in ‘hatred’, rather than as the unavoidable law of physics, that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The fact that Purim and everything it stands for signals nothing to them in terms of it being abnormal, unhealthy, etc, tells us everything about Jews’ capacity to live a peaceful coexistence with non-Jews. Imagine if Gentiles had a similar festival to Purim, only instead of Jews eating parts of Gentiles, it was the other way around. We would never hear the end of it.

Jesus clearly had the people who adhere to this toxic mindset pegged–‘Children of the devil’

Apologies to the editors. I think I placed this lengthy piece of information under the wrong article before. So here it is again in the Purim section of articles.

As part of a large two volume project on the fictional nature of the biblical narrative, I have done a lot of research on the Book of Esther (the only book of the Hebrew Bible that does not mention Yahweh Elohim), and I will try to sum up that research here as concisely as possible. The biblical Book of Esther and the narrative it describes are completely fictional. It is a work of the Hellenistic period, and like the Book of Daniel, fits into the literary genre of the ‘Hebrew novella’, i.e. it is a mini-novel. There is a strong scholarly consensus favoring a period of composition sometime in the 4th century BC, even including the early Hellenistic period following the 323 BC death of Alexander the Great in Babylon. Because of its theme of ethnic revenge through mass murder, Persian historian J. M. Cook has called the book of Esther a “racialistic perversion of Achaemenid history,” and as a reliable source of that history, writes: “the book of Esther has no historical value” (1). Mary Joan Winn Leith refers to the book of Esther as “a Hellenistic novel set in the Persian court” (2).

The name ‘Esther’ is either derived from the Persian word for star (aster), or may also be a form of ‘Ishtar’, the ancient goddess of love and war, and the Babylonian “Queen of Heaven,” which, for the biblical author’s symbolic purposes, is a name perfectly fitting the character and her role in his narrative.

Although the biblical book of Esther is a fictional literary work, it does weave several notable historical elements into the narrative in order to give it the illusion of being history – a technique employed by the authors of all good historical novels, where historical figures interact with fictional characters. One of these historical elements is the Persian king who is employed by the author to play the part of Esther’s husband in the tale. In Hebrew this monarch is called ‘Ahashverosh’, which in its Greek Septuagint form is ‘Ahasuerus’. In Persian history he was called ‘Khshayarshan’, but is better known to us by his 5th century BC Greek name – ‘Xerxes’, a king who ruled over the Persian Empire from 485 – 465 BC as the son and successor to King Darius I (521 – 486 BC).

Another historical character in this story is King Xerxes’ queen, named Vashti in the book of Esther (1:9), and known to the 5th century BC Greek historian Herodotus as Queen Amestris. She was the daughter of Otanes (Utana), the commander of the Persian army (7.61), (3) and was the sole wife and queen of Xerxes I. After the assassination of her husband in August 465 BC, she reigned as queen mother throughout the rule of her third and youngest son, Artaxerxes I (464 – 424/23 BC).

As reported by Herodotus, Queen Amestris had a revengeful nature and could be rather bloodthirsty at times in the conduct of her power. These characteristics—attributed to an historical personality in the reports of a contemporary Greek historian—seem to have been transferred, or projected, by the later biblical author, from the historically reported model onto the literary character of Queen Esther.

In this regard, Herodotus (7.114) heard that when Amestris was old, she had fourteen children of Persian nobility buried alive as a gift to the god who lives under the ground. In the Persika of Ctesias, the Persian general Megabyzus, son of Zopyrus (the most honoured Persian in the reign of Darius I), is said to have negotiated an armistice and clemency deal with Athens regarding its Greek prisoners of war taken by the Persian forces in Egypt, but the deal fell apart when Queen Amestris had all fifty Athenian prisoners put to death at her behest (4). Because of the gifting traditions of the Persian royal court, a Persian queen could often come to wield a degree of military power. Herodotus (9.109) speaks of queens of Persia being given command over their own personal military force as a traditional gift from the king.

From the very start of biblical composition in the 7th century BC, the Jews have plagiarized and liberally borrowed from the literary works of their “pagan” neighbors to cleverly construct a completely fictional fantasy history of their people and imaginary tribal god. The composition method of the Book of Esther is no different, and its author was clearly familiar with The Histories of Herodotus.

Esther 2:16 informs the reader that a woman of Judean Benjaminite descent, Hadassah/Esther, was eventually selected to replace Queen Vashti/Amestris, and was crowned Queen of the Persian Empire in Tebeth, the tenth month of the Hebrew calendar (corresponding to December-January), in Xerxes’ seventh regnal year (478 BC). Interestingly, this is the exact same year, as reported by Herodotus, in which Xerxes returns from his failed attempt to conquer Greece and ends up having an affair with his young and beautiful niece, which is subsequently discovered by his queen, who then launches a campaign of bloody revenge against the girl’s mother. It is the matching of these dates, and the mirrored symbolic similarity of the events, that form one of the reasons why it is thought that the author of Esther used the history reported by Herodotus as a model for his own reworked tale set in the time of this same king.

In the 8th chapter of Esther, the Persian king’s new Jewish vizier Mordecai does not simply rescind Haman’s orders to kill all the Jews—issued due to Mordecai disrespecting Haman’s royal office—and thus save his people in a peaceful manner, but instead, issues a grant of rights (in the name of Xerxes) to all the Jews of the Persian Empire to “defend” themselves on an appointed day (the 13th of Adar) by murdering any Gentile man, woman, or child they think “might” possibly attack them in the future, and to also plunder the property of the Gentiles whom they murder (Esther 8:11). The author of Esther tells the reader that this unprovoked, paranoiac mass murder resulted in the deaths of 75,810 Gentiles. This type of action is known as ‘pre-emptive genocidal murder and thievery based upon paranoiac delusions’ and, unfortunately, occupies the primordial, foundational strata of the Zionist psychology of the modern Israeli state, which sees the book of Esther as inspirational literature in all of its ramifications. In the third edition of The American Heritage Dictionary, ‘paranoia’ is defined as “a psychotic disorder characterized by delusions of persecution or grandeur.” A state of people believing themselves to be history’s number one ‘whipping boy’, as well as members of God’s favorite Iron Age tribal confederation, would certainly be a prime subject highly susceptible to such a collective paranoic psychosis.

Just as we are told in Esther 8:17 that various ethnic groups throughout the empire were seized with “fear of the Jews,” who were now armed for genocide with an official Persian royal decree of their own, so in Esther 9:3 it is stated that the provincial nobles, the satraps, the governors, and administrators of the Persian Empire were, at this time, seized with “fear of Mordecai.” Esther 8:17 also tells us that the eight-month-long, “fear of the power of Mordecai” period was a big season for Gentiles converting to Judaism, hoping, by conversion, that their families would not be murdered by “the Jews” and their property plundered.

However, there is no actual empirical historical evidence that the one hundred and twenty seven provinces of the Persian Empire were filled with blood-thirsty, Jew-hating Gentiles ready to go on a genocidal rampage at the behest of a Persian king or his grand vizier. On the contrary, this would seem to be a clear case of psychological “projection” on the part of the Jewish author of Esther. He is the one who actually wishes for the extermination of the Gentiles, i.e. 99.99% of the world, but cannot honestly psychologically face that about himself, so he “projects” that desire onto the Gentiles, thus turning them into murderous racists, and himself into an “eternally victimized innocent,” a position from which he can exploit others through the manipulation of their guilt, or murder them in cold blood under the delusions of his own paranoid mental state.

In empirical historical reality, there was no Benjaminite queen of the Persian Empire, no Mordecai, no murderous edict from the fictional, comic book-like character, the evil grand vizier, Haman, nor any mass slaying of Gentiles across the Persian Empire in 472 BC. It was merely the Jewish genocidal fantasy of the novella’s Hellenistic author, a genocidal fantasy and false history that has been passed down over the centuries as an important murderous and bloody part of plagiarized, falsified Jewish “history.”

In our modern times, Neuvo-Mordecai, also known by his adopted Hebrew name as Ben-yamin Netan-yahu, wants to causelessly attack the country of the people who liberated the Judahites from Babylonian captivity and provided them with two centuries of prosperity and goodwill during the Persian Period. In such cases, while it is sad, and while life tries to imitate art and imagination, hard-core historical reality will ultimately prevail over the mythic, with the members of all unreasonable houses punished mightily for their deep wickedness and folly.